Plastic Beach

GorillazPlastic Beach

You can’t really blame Damon Albarn for making a record like Plastic Beach. Already deep into a career with a legendary band (Blur) and head of a perfectly successful pop side project (Gorillaz), I imagine him lounging in some hip downtown condo, surrounded by musical toys and recording equipment. He can work with nearly any producer he wants and can call up almost any artist for a collaboration. He lives in arguably the best candy store ever - full of sweet, available talent and everything needed to make a record. And, as his Gorillaz project has grown, so has his comfort with experimenting, here making a record that feels like one man’s very eccentric version of modern pop culture.

Listing to Plastic Beach reminds me most of listening to college radio stations. A very diverse (yet also somehow cohesive in production scope) collection of forever cartoon-y songs, the album touches on so many different sounds and currently hip styles that you could almost match each track to a different artist from Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2009 list. Notably, the record features quite a bit of hip-hop influence - nothing too new for this crew. Here things seem to go even further than they did when Automator and Danger Mouse were offering production. Not only do we get somewhat obvious cameos from Mos Def, De La Soul and Bashy and Kano, but Snoop Dogg also shows up.

But, save for the Snoop offering, these aren’t your usual hip-hop cameos. No, these are a true mod’s version of backpacker hip-hop, meaning that the songs are loopy, dance-ready and over-produced. It’s a wonder that Dizzee Rascal and The Streets don’t show up, let alone Andre 3000 and Kool Keith. (Might I suggest Dose One?) Do these hip-hop tracks work for hip-hop fans, and is there enough hip-hop here for crossover influence? Hard to say. My guess is that, at best, the songs will have enough of that crossover/novelty appeal for some, yet not enough to set the mixtape circuit on fire.

Some of the other collaborations on this cameo-stuffed record don’t work quite as well as the Mos Def and Bashy and Kano appearances. Bobby Womack, who guests on two songs, is something awful. My guess is that Albarn thought he’d revive the man’s career in Tarantino fashion, but damn if the results aren’t awful. So bad. I also found the Gruff Rhys appearance to be unnecessary, as they hardly use him and certainly don‘t focus on what he does best. And Mark E. Smith?! Seriously, Mark E. Smith on a Gorillaz record?! Weird. Doesn’t quite work, but it is an interesting listen. One guest who does oddly fit, however, is Lou reed. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that “Some Kind of Nature” is the best Reed track in 10 or more years.

The best cuts on the disc, for my money, are the Reed track (natch), the Mos Def cuts and, more than anything else, the five proper tracks that don’t feature guests. Whenever Albarn takes center stage (and, strangely, it‘s not often at all), I kind of love Plastic Beach and am tempted to take it very seriously. The no-guest tracks feel like real songs - almost weird prog-pop, even. It’s great stuff, and, if the album wasn’t so messy with guests and genre tourism, this would be the modern big label record.

As a whole, Plastic Beach is only decent, feeling more like a collection of iTunes one-offs than a real record. And, in that way, I suppose this album is about as modern as they come. In this age of iStore pick-your-tracklist customers, Plastic Beach is a winner. It features something for almost everyone, from obscurists to pop radio fans. For an album lover like myself, though, this is a long, bloated, anything-goes wreck of a project that I only care to hear maybe 33 percent of ever again. Had this been a similar sounding record with all Albarn vocals and maybe two or three (non-rap) guests, I think it’d stand a chance to be brilliant. But, hey, you know what they say about the kid in the candy shop.   7/10

Written by G. William Locke